Saturday, October 18, 2008

The OBAMAWARE SALE will now go live on October 19th, Sunday night 8pm EST and will be up as an auction for 3 days. There will be a Buy It Now option, which will be first come, first serve as soon as it goes live. Please register on Ebay beforehand so that you will be ready to bid.

Thank you for all your good wishes and support and good luck bidding!!

Go Obama/Biden!

From 27 of the best ceramic artists in the country, an online sale featuring Obama-Biden specific pots in limited editions.

yahoo: A sculpture is photographed by a visitor at Sydney's Tamarama Beach in Australia Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2008. Sculpture by the Sea is Australia's largest annual outdoor exhibition of sculpture, free to the public. The 2008 exhibition will feature over 100 sculptures from seven different countries and will run for three weeks.(AP Photo/Mark Baker)

This dailykos diary has clips from the Bill Maher show from HBO last night.

Jere from A Red Sox Fan From Pinstripe Territory has many photos and videos from the Red Sox amazing Game 6 5 comeback win [Freudian slip, there].

While ACORN is being excoriated for voter registration fraud for having workers fill out bogus registration forms, then flagging them as bogus before sending them in to the states, Republicans hired a firm to deliberately defraud voters into changing their registration from Democrat to Republican. Read this LATimes article on the firm hired by the California Republican Party -- Young Political Majors, or YPM -- which has a long, documented history of voter registration fraud. In California, they duped people into changing their registration to Republican by telling them they were signing petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. That's fraud with intent to commit fraud.

The third in the series of videos by the Wasilla Project. Here's how they describe this one:

On the heels of the final, historic 2008 presidential debate, the Wasilla Project releases Part 3 of our series, where we examine Palins record as a fiscal conservative. Clearly, the economy has emerged as the dominant issue of the 2008 presidential campaign and we hope that this video will be a useful contribution in understanding some of the history of Palins public service in Alaska.

After 8 years of a Republican White House, there still seems to be a reality distortion field around the concept of Fiscal Conservative. Governor Palin presents herself as a fiscal conservative who has a record of helping taxpayers in her state. The reality has often been quite different.

Its surprising that someone who came into office as mayor to cut wasteful spending and lower property taxes, actually left office with Wasilla over $20 million in debt, when records show that she entered office with city debt at one million or less.

Some $14-15 million of that debt was due to a hockey rink she built while in office, land for which Wasilla negotiated the purchase for $145,000. They eventually paid out nearly $1.5 million for the land, not counting legal fees, due to Palin moving forward on the project before the city had clear title to the land. This echoes in significant ways Palins later negotiations as governor on the Alaskan pipeline, where she committed $500 million in taxpayer money, without assurances that a Canadian company would even build the pipeline.

As the economy worsens in the United States, markets around the world are crashing and people are losing their homes and pensions, its irresponsible not to question the economic positions and records of the candidates. In the case of Palin, her record has been extremely troubling and reflects part of the reason that she has lost credibility with so many Alaskans in recent weeks.

Obama yesterday in Roanoke, VA attacks McCain's terrible healthcare plan which would slash Medicare and tax benefits for the first time ever. "Every single American has a right to affordable, accessible health care."

Hey Sarah Palin, do you tell them in WasillaThat 4,000 years ago we roamed the planet with GodzillaIs it trueI am so fucking scared of youAs number 2

Hey Sarah Palin, I think Alaska's very prettyBut just 100,000 people more than Oklahoma CityYes it's trueGo look it up, I'm telling youOh man, we're through

ChorusOh, if you become VP, oh, it's Canada for me (2x)It's Canada for me

Hey Sarah Palin, did you really once inquireWhether you could throw library books into a big bonfireGod, my eyesThis really might be our demiseThis pack of lies

Hey Sarah Palin, just because you're good at shootinDoesn't mean you have the ammo to negotiate with PutinAre you on cokeThis fucking country's up in smokeOh what a joke

ChorusOh, if you become VP, oh what will it mean for me (2x)

BridgeJust because I can see the moonDoesn't make me an astronaut, you loonYour foreign policy expertise is pooDo you really think a woman commitsTo a candidate just because she has titsPlease tell me that this ticket is not trueI thought that there could be no worseThan Cheney, but here you are, I curseThe madman who would cast a vote for youAnd McCain too

Hey Sarah Palin, is it media distortionOr would you tell a girl who's raped that she could not have an abortionIt's a new lowWho knows just how far you would goI'd rather vote for Ross PerotHey Sarah Palin I don't knowWhere can we go

Friday, October 17, 2008

1. The big news is that the Supreme Court delivered a quick rebuke to the wingnutty 6th Circuit, overruling their decision to order the Ohio Secretary of State to have to "review" 600,000 new voter registrations against driver's license and social security databases. This prevents disenfranchisement by typo, whereby perfectly qualified voters are denied the right to vote because a letter in their name was entered incorrectly (that would have made JoeSam the Plumber ineligible, as his name is Wurzelbacher, but the registrar has him listed as Worzelbacher).

[It must be noted that the decision, while good in protecting voting rights on the eve of this election, denies the GOP a private right of action to enforce the statute. That means that only government action can enforce that law. That is a bad principle in civil rights cases when you have a virulently anti-civil-rights administration like the Bush Administration, who allow civil rights violations to proliferate by not bringing such action. Good decision on this narrow case, made on a terrible basis for many future cases.]

David Iglesias says he's shocked by the news, leaked today to the Associated Press, that the FBI is pursuing a voter-fraud investigation into ACORN just weeks before the election."I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again," Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. "Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic." In 2006, Iglesias was fired as U.S. attorney thanks partly to his reluctance to pursue voter-fraud cases as aggressively as DOJ wanted -- one of several U.S. attorneys fired for inappropriate political reasons, according to a recently released report by DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.

Iglesias, who has been the most outspoken of the fired U.S. attorneys, went on to say that the FBI's investigation seemed designed to inappropriately create a "boogeyman" out of voter fraud.

3. The AP (the AP!) factchecks the McCain campaign's allegations about ACORN and rejects them.

[I]n alleging voter fraud, McCain goes too far. To commit fraud, a person would have to show up on Election Day with identification bearing the fake name.

4. In perhaps the best news, the Obama campaign is aggressively tying the bogus ACORN investigation and the U.S. Attorney Scandal, including conducting a telephone conference with the media today:

The General Counsel of the Obama campaign is currently holding a media conference call to "Announce Major Action Taken Today To Address Illegal Conduct and Improprieties in the Sham "Anti-Fraud" Campaign Orchestrated By McCain-Palin and the RNC."

Check out this letter from the Obama campaign to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking for an investigation into ties between Bush's Justice Department and the McCain campaign's "systematic development and dissemination of unsupported, spurious allegations of vote fraud." I.e., don't try ginning up voter fraud prosecutions from the Justice Department in this election, my friends. This Democrat won't be caught napping.

Barack Obama is a fighting Democrat, and it's been a long time since we have seen a Democrat wage such a tough, disciplined fight.

The facts - as even the reluctant to bother actually doing reporting Corporate Media have revealed - are that: Joe The Plumber only makes $40,000 a year, doesn't have a valid plumbers license in the state of Ohio, has only been a "plumber" for 6 years - not 15, has never finished his plumber courses, has never apprenticed as a plumber, can't afford to buy his bosses business - which only generates $100,000 a year in income, not $250,000 - is a registered republican who owes over a $1,000 in back taxes, and under any version of Obama's plan would get a tax cut that would be larger than McCain's.

This powerful ad ran on CNN after the debate, according to Americablog:

Transcript:

[Young woman narrator] I was raped and then I got pregnant. Sarah Palin believes that the government should be able to force me to carry the pregnancy to term. Sarah Palin believes that the government should make that choice, not me. Governor Palin, I didn't have a choice about being raped, but I should have a choice about this.

Narrator: "True, but you did vote with Bush 90% of the time. Tax breaks for big corporations and the wealthy but almost nothing for the middle class. Same as Bush. Keep spending $10 billion a month in Iraq while our own economy struggles. Same as Bush. You may not be George Bush, but..."

McCain: "I voted with the President over 90% of the time, higher than, uh, a lot of my, uh, even Republican colleagues."

I admire the Obama campaign's message discipline. McCain = four more years of Bush.

This was my favorite moment from the debate, when Obama looked McCain in the eye and said people are saying "terrorist" and "kill him" about me at your running mate's rallies, and she doesn't object to that. And McCain blinks. He has nothing.

Watch John McCain put the phrase "health of the mother" in airquotes during the debate. Like there's no such thing as health of the mother. Like women's health isn't important. Actually it's pretty clear that McCain doesn't think women's health is important. Just look at his shitty healthcare plan.

Go fuck yourself, you rich old asshole who's had government paid healthcare your whole life. Just go away. Now.

"You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is. Gantt supports Ted Kennedy's racial quota law that makes the color of your skin more important than your qualifications. Your vote on this issue next Tuesday. For racial quotas, Harvey Gantt. Against racial quotas, Jesse Helms."

I say Obama will be cool as a cucumber and keep bringing every discussion back to the economy. Also, McCain will mangle some difficult-to-pronounce name. Attacks will fail. Post-debate polls will give it to Obama. Fox Newsies will wail and gnash their teeth.

Tuesday's order directs [Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer] Brunner to verify new registrations by comparing that information with data from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles or the Social Security Administration.

The 6th Circuit is one of the most conservative, Bush-Bush-Reagan laden federal courts in the country. Not surprising that a decision which could disenfranchise tens of thousands of new voters comes from such a conservative circuit.

Organized by Ayumi Horie (I own two of her mugs) 20 potters have made pottery to raise money for Barack Obama. Preview of the work available here. The sale was supposed to start tomorrow, but their server crashed, so now it will take place on Monday.

William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.

The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein's government.

I can't WAIT for McCain to bring up William Ayers in the debate. What should Obama say? "Well, at least I didn't hire him to run my transition team, like you hired Saddam Hussein's lobbyist." is one way to go. Or, "I was eight years old when Williams Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground. You were 56 years old when your transition team head was lobbying for Saddam Hussein. What, did you forget about that when you selected him to your team? Or did you just not care?"

Barack Obama is leading John McCain53 percent to 39 percent among registered voters with 1 percent preferring someone else and 6 percent answering "depends" or undecided in a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted Oct. 10-13. The "depends/undecided" voters lean to Obama 54 percent to 41 percent. Obama's overall margin over McCain is 2 points less if Ralph Nader and Libertarian Bob Barr are factored into the choices. Obama had led by 3 points in this poll at the beginning of October.

Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, Texas Governor Rick Perry, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, all have supported ACORN's work and appeared with members of the organization -- all in the past three years.

And now ACORN is the boogeyman, because Republicans don't have any issues to run on. Oh, and don't forget that many of the leaders of ACORN are black. Race-baiting, anyone?

Yesterday McCain recycled his speech in favor of electing George W. Bush at the 2004 Republican Convention. Very green of him. As a matter of fact, he's recycling Bush, as he selected George W. Bush in lipstick as his running mate .

Ridiculous. ACORN is an anti-poverty organization. They advocate for affordable housing (including a campaign against foreclosures by predatory lenders), better schools, a living wage, reform of immigration laws, health care, and paid sick days, among others. Here's a video that describes the work ACORN does. As part of their work they have launched a voter registration project along with Project Vote, another 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

States and the federal government all require that voter registration be non-partisan. In most states, it is required that if you register voters, BY LAW you must turn in every registration form. (That's to keep a group from registering voters and then only turning in the registration forms for people they think will vote for their candidate, or the way they want them to.)

ACORN pays people to do voter registration, often people who are unemployed and have a hard time getting jobs otherwise. (Again, that's part of their mission, ending poverty. One way to do that is to give an unemployed person a job.) And sometimes, not often but sometimes, those people cheat and turn in forms with the entire roster of the Dallas Cowboys on them, or some other fakery. By law ACORN is required to turn in those registration forms, even if it knows they are fake.

And that's the only fraud involved here, voter registration fraud. The Dallas Cowboys do not show up to vote. Poor people are not going to the polls and pretending to be Tony Romo and Terrell Owens. The fraud is perpetrated by the paid help who cheat ACORN. ACORN actually flags bogus registrations when they turn them in to the states to alert them that there is a problem. Therefore, as this Cincinnati Enquirer column points out, bogus registrations are a pain, not a problem.

There are almost no cases of actual voter fraud where a voter voted frauduently. The Bush Administrations's push to crack down on (nonexistant) voter fraud has only resulted in 120 prosecutions -- and only 86 convictions -- in the past five years. That's not .00001 percent of the voting electorate. Infinitesimally small.

And the current Republican obsession with ACORN? It's a made up issue. John McCain has supported ACORN over the years, including his appearance at an ACORN-sponsored event in March of 2006:

John McCain, in March of 2006, sitting beside Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek at an event ACORN co-sponsored in Florida.

That's right, John McCain was for ACORN before he was against it.

And here's John McCain extolling the virtues of ACORN in his address to the group. Remember, this is March of 2006, 2 1/2 years ago, John McCain was "telling immigration rights activists at a rally in Miami that they "are what makes America special."

Don't let the Republicans defraud you into believing that ACORN is going to steal the election, or that ACORN is a bad or scary group. They're just using this as an excuse to attack Obama, because they have no plan to fix the economy, and no other way to win the election other than lies and deception.

Or just lying? He claims people at Obama rallies have yelled "kill him" and "terrorist" towards McCain. There's no evidence to support this, of course, as the worst Obama rally goers shout towards McCain is "BOOOOOOO". Jed Lewison posted this video of McCain's claim, calling it "Another bizarre lie."

The state chairman of the Virginia Republican Party, Jeff Frederick, told a group of Virginia volunteers that Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden "both have friends who bombed the Pentagon, that is scary."

That is, of course, a bald-faced lie, and a transparent attempt to once again call Obama a terrorist.

Yesterday, Frederick said he stood by the comparison, even though bin Laden planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon that killed 184 people and Obama was a child and hadn't met Ayers when the Weather Underground planted a bomb at the Pentagon in 1972. No one was hurt in that blast, in which a bomb exploded in a restroom and caused flooding and damage to computer tapes containing classified information.Ayers did not participate at the Pentagon in the bombing but admitted to involvement in other blasts.

And what of John McCain? How did he respond to this baseless smear, Mr. I'm-Going-To-Run-A-Respectful-Campaign John McCain?

He concludes: "And she's running as the partner of a 72-year-old cancer survivor! I mean, Monty Python could have written this. [laughs] And I'm sorry, Michael Palin, to say you're not the funniest Palin any more, but you're not."

Monday, October 13, 2008

[T]he difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.

I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign's choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it's only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—"My friends"—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven't felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot's running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America's most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn't qualify him then and it doesn't qualify McCain now.

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

[]

...With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.

GREENSBORO, NC - SEPTEMBER 27: Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) holds a baby at a campaign rally at the J. Douglas Galyon Depot on September 27, 2008 in Greensboro, North Carolina. After participating in the first of three presidential debates yesterday Obama is campaigning through North Carolina with a focus on his strategy for the recent national financial turmoil.

Presumptive US Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) holds up a baby as he takes part in a town hall-style meeting in Bristol, Virginia, June 5, 2008.

US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama holds a supporter's baby after delivering a policy speech at the Resch Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on September 22, 2008.

I really like all these photos of Obama holding babies on the campaign trail. In most of them he becomes very still, and very tuned in to the little person he is holding. It almost looks like he is getting a break from campaigning, to remember what holding his girls was like when they were little babies. He projects trustworthiness by the careful, respectful way he handles the babies handed to him out of the crowd. And when the babies are a little older (last two photos) he reacts appropriately to however they're feeling.

Overall, Obama is leading 53 percent to 43 percent among likely voters, and for the first time in the general-election campaign, voters gave the Democrat a clear edge on tax policy and providing strong leadership.

McCain has made little headway in his attempts to convince voters that Obama is too "risky" or too "liberal." Rather, recent strategic shifts may have hurt the Republican nominee, who now has higher negative ratings than his rival and is seen as mostly attacking his opponent rather than addressing the issues that voters care about. Even McCain's supporters are now less enthusiastic about his candidacy, returning to levels not seen since before the Republican National Convention.

Conversely, Obama's pitch to the middle class on taxes is beginning to sink in; nearly as many said they think their taxes would go up under a McCain administration as under an Obama presidency, and more see their burdens easing with the Democrat in the White House.

Another John McCain lie exposed. At the Saddleback Forum in August, McCain was asked which three people were the wisest people he knew, whose advice he would rely upon heavily during his administration. Yesterday John Lewis advised him to pull back from the abyss of stirring racial hatred against Obama, that he and his running mate are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and what did John McCain do? He attacked John Lewis. McCain even put out another racist dogwhistle in his response, in which he claimed that Lewis' criticism is:

...a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans..."

Hardworking means white. Especially in this context, since nearly everyone at a McCain rally who isn't a paid plant is white, and it is white people who are screaming "kill him", "terrorist", and "traitor" at McCain rallies.